“Are we the bad guys? Are we the good guys? Who are we?”

But where does this leave Mark as a person? When Mark talked about gentrification, he was genuinely unsure of which side of the conversation he most associated himself with. And that conundrum applies not only for Mark, but for all of us. Who has a right to space, and place? Is it reserved for people who have been there the longest, or can it be more fluid than that?

One aspect that bears mentioning is the idea of gentrification and displacement as a cohesive process, one necessarily coupled with the other, inextricably and inexorably linked. If that is so, then the physical movement of people from place to place creates a chain where it is impossible to locate the beginning or the end. Perhaps that is why it is such a difficult force to combat. As Mark sees it, “We don’t have the ability to control the bigger picture,” in a large part due to the fact that “transition [isn’t] stoppable” because “people grow” (Lu 12). As growth is constant, so is change, necessitating that the entire fabric of neighborhoods and cities would upend themselves with time and give over to something entirely different. In a city that changes as rapidly and dramatically as New York City, is this surprising? Or is it more surprising that there has been a concerted effort to halt change?

When Mark talks about his life, he sees himself as a piece in the circle. One of Mark’s favorite parts about living in Melrose is the reflection is gives him on what his life was like when he and his family immigrated from China. The economic and social diversity of the place serves as a reminder of what he and his family worked through, to where Mark is nearly 20 years later. As Doreen Massey notes in “Double Articulation,” “Just as the present character of place is being battled over, so there is no one single ‘past’ to point to anyway” (Massey 113). This goes for Mark, who sees Third Avenue and thinks about what Fulton Street in Brooklyn used to look like, noting its potential to make that same transition. The same goes for neighborhood residents who have called Melrose home for their entire lives and can note every shop that’s closed, opened, or changed hands in the last 30 years. There is no one way of understanding places, so is there a wrong way?

In Mark’s opinion: “It’s selfish to say that we need to preserve the neighborhood for the people who’s already here because people who are coming are also people … being displaced from other neighborhoods, and they deserve a place to live [emphasis mine]” (Lu 12).

Does everyone deserve a place to live? And do they deserve a place to live that meets their standards and understanding of needs? When Mark questioned his place in Melrose, one of the things he said was, “Are we invading other people’s space?” That idea of an invasion is an important one because it begs the question of who owns, or has the right to space. To complicate this narrative beyond the typologies of good and bad, gentrification and displacement, there must be an essential acknowledgement of the humanity of all the actors involved. As Mark mentioned, people gentrifying one neighborhood may be those displaced from another. Doreen Massey stresses that, “The separation from places and possessions may be almost literally a separation from parts of oneself” (Massey 184). To intentionally cause someone the trauma of displacement from a home that they understand to be part of their core identity, one must fundamentally diminish their presence as a human being. For when we think about these issues as affecting real human lives, they are painful and hard to grapple with. It is not easy to take a stance because it implicates oneself as an actor.

In that way, there is no direct solution or conclusion. These ideas do not come together neatly, and sometimes they do not come together at all. But it is important to place ourselves in the narrative that exists, in all its necessary complexities and inconsistencies in an attempt to better understand how we situate ourselves in our own communities.